Texts :: Biography

Orson Welles came to Hollywood having
soared to prominence as a producer of stage
and radio. Given carte blanche by George J.
Schaefer, president of RKO studios, Welles was
determined to create something highly personal for his film debut. He had considered and
reluctantly discarded an adaptation of Joseph
Conrad's Heart of Darkness and been forced to
abandon a project based on Nicholas Blake's
The Smiler With a Knife, owing to the aversion
of Carole Lombard and Rosalind Russell - the
film's potential stars - to working with an
untried director.

Undeterred, Welles decided that he would
play the lead in an original story, Citizen Kane
(1940), concorted by Herman Mankiewicz and
himself. Despite the risks involved, Schaefer
stood by Welles and turned over the resources
of his studio to him. But prior to release, the film
ran into unexpected problems. Louella O.
Parsons, head of the movie department of
Hearst's newspaper empire, had been one of
the first to view the film and had complained to
Hearst that Citizen Kane's story was nothing
but an unflattering version of Hearst's liaison
with his mistress, Marion Davies. The Hearst
newspapers refused to run advertisements for the film. As a result, Citizen Kane did not have
a nationwide release and some cinemas even
cancelled their bookings. In spite of a number
of intelligent and enthusiastic reviews, it was
not the runaway box-office hit the studios had
hoped for.

RKO was concerned, therefore, about
Welles' second venture, The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), a film version of Booth Tarkington's novel, which was already in
production. Welles did not act in The Magnificent Ambersons, preferring to concentrate his
talents on directing the picture. He was
thoroughly conversant with his material; in
1939 he had played the part of the unsympathetic young hero, George Amberson
Minafer, on the radio. He cast Tim Holt in this
role for the film and devoted all his energies to
re-creating a nostalgic picture of American life
in the nineteenth century.

To those few who were lucky enough to see
the sneak preview of the completed film at the
United Artists Theatre in Pasadena, The Magnificent Ambersons was a stunning, never-to-be-
forgotten event, in every way as important
cinematically as Citizen Kane. However, the
film was sent back to the editing room as the
studio felt further cutting was necessary.

Welles was meanwhile staggering production on two films, Journey Into Fear (1942) - a
version of the Eric Ambler novel, which Welles
was directing with Norman Foster and also
acting in - and a semi-documentary about
South America made with the cooperation of
the US government, It's All True.

The worst thing that could have happened
to Welles' career in Hollywood then hit with
the suddenness of a Californian earthquake:
Schaefer, Welles' sponsor, was replaced as
head of production at RKO by Charles J.
Koerner, a man who knew how to distribute
and exhibit movies, had great taste, but no
patience with failure at the box-office. Welles,
busy shooting in South America, was summarily fired, and all the film he had shot for It's
All True was deposited in the RKO vaults where
it remained until June 1978 when a portion of
it was shown for the first time.

On July 1. 1942, The Magnificent Ambersons, a third of its original length edited out - and with it much of its bitter-sweet drama - opened
in Los Angeles as part of a double bill with a
'programmer' called Mexican Spitfire Sees a
Ghost (1942). The Hollywood career of Orson
Welles seemed to have ground to a halt: he was
regarded as an expensive eccentric.

When Journey Into Fear was released it had
been even more mangled by RKO's editors
than The Magnificent Ambersons. Wisely,
Welles left Hollywood. His name had been
linked with the beautiful Dolores Del Rio, but
when she saw what remained of her work in
Journey Into Fear, she threw up her hands in despair and returned to her native Mexico.

When Welles returned to Hollywood, he did
so solely as an actor. He was cast in Jane Eyre
(1943) as the moody Mr Rochester, who
conceals his insane wife in the attic of his
house. The production had been set up by
David 0. Selznick and then sold with two other
potential Selznick productions (Claudia, 1943,
and Keys to the Kingdom, 1944) to 20th
Century-Fox because Selznick desperately
needed ready money. Selznick had set up
Robert Stevenson as director of Jane Eyre, and
he had supervised the script prepared by
Aldous Huxley and the production designs of
William Pereira. From the beginning, Jane Eyre
was to star Joan Fontaine; the role of Rochester
had been styled for an older actor, such as
Ronald Colman. Colman, however, was ill, and
another candidate, Laurence Olivier, was in
war service for his own country. Welles was an
unexpected choice for the part, but was approved by all concerned. His Rochester was
young and handsome, and he played the
character with great theatrical bombast.
Colman and Olivier might have chosen to act
the part with more subtlety, but Welles invested it with a romantic fury, more closely akin to another Bronte hero - Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.

Jane Eyre was well received, and Welles had
no difficulty getting other acting roles. He was
believable in a mysterious soap-opera romance, Tomorrow Is Forever, playing opposite
Claudette Colbert, and he was even allowed to
direct The Stranger (both 1946), in which he
played the lead - a Nazi war criminal attempting to conceal his murky past. He, however.
never thought much of that picture.

Orson Welles ~ The Third Man (1949)

In 1947 he directed his wife Rita Hayworth
(they had married in 1943) in The Lady From
Shanghai, an exotic melodrama - now regarded as a classic - that at the time attracted a
small coterie of admirers. They chose to disregard Louella Parsons when she named Welles 'awesome Orson, the self-styled genius' and
informed fans that he was not only 'washed
up' in Hollywood, but was finished as Rita's
husband. She was right in her latter
accusation, for Hayworth and Welles soon
divorced, Miss Hayworth declaring:

'I can't take his genius any more'

Welles may have been surprised to find that
Hollywood - at least his own peers - was
sympathetic to his previous misfortunes as a
director. His first two films had many admirers. Vera Hruba Ralston, wife of the head
of Republic studios, Herbert Yates, is rumoured
to have persuaded her husband to put both
Welles and John Ford on the Republic lists to
give the studio some real class. Yates let Welles
direct a production of Shakespeare's Macbeth
(1948). which he made in just 23 days and on a
remarkably low budget. It is an uneven but
extremely effective picture, and one of the best
presentations of the play on film.

Although he was to return to Hollywood once
more to make Touch of Evil (1958), Welles'
Macbeth (1948) may be taken to mark his final
divorce, as director, from the film capital. This
was the first of his series of screen encounters
with Shakespeare. To admit that it is also the
least satisfactory of them is not to deny that it
is, at the same time, one of the most imaginative of the cinema's adaptations of the playwright, comparing with Kurosawa's Kumonso-Jo (1957, Throne of Blood) and towering, in its
imaginative force, over Polanski's later version
made in 1971. But the restrictions of time and
money show. and the performances are
uneven. Welles' collaborators seemed to find it
hard to follow his imaginative flights.

This is hardly surprising: Welles spent
sixty years of his life brooding on the mastery
and mysteries of Shakespeare, and reshaping
them to find new interpretations. It is said that
his bed-time stories at the age of two were
Charles Lamb's Tales From Shakespeare. At
three he rejected these in favour of the original
texts. By seven he knew King Lear by heart, and
by ten he had learnt all the great tragic roles.

After Macbeth he began to film Othello. The
work was to become the kind of odyssey which was
henceforth to characterize Welles' life. The filming
dragged on from 1949 to 1952,
moving from location to location across Morocco and Italy. When money ran out, work
would stop - to recommence when funds came
in and cast could be reassembled.

Orson Welles

If the difficulties of production again show in the uncertainty of the overall conception, at least here
Welles could call on more talented associates than he had been able to for Macbeth : his old friend and early mentor from his
youthful days as an actor in Dublin. Micheal
MacLiammoir, creates a wonderful, feline Iago
whose malice, the film infers, is the product of
sexual impotence.

Welles now seemed doomed to endless wandering, leaving in his wake a host of uncompleted
or abortive projects. In 1955 he
began to film Don Quixote in Mexico and Paris, with
himself as the Don and Akim Tamiroff, one of Welles' favourite actors, as Sancho Panza, but the film was never completed. Other
projects talked of along the way include the
Biblical stories of Noah, Abraham and
Salome; two more Shakespeare subjects, King
Lear and Julius Caesar (eventually produced in
1953 by an old Mercury Theatre collaborator,
John Houseman, with Joseph Mankiewicz as
director); Pickwick Papers and (ironically) The
Odyssey ; Catch-22, which was eventually made
by Mike Nichols in 1970. with Welles himself
playing General Dreedle.

Even in the days of his childhood encounters
with Shakespeare, Welles showed a special
affection for larger-than-life characters. Mr
Arkadin (1954) is a monster on the lines of
Citizen Kane, a man of great wealth and power,
who, unlike Kane, hires his own investigator
to reconstruct the history of his mysterious
career. This is, it is revealed, a test to establish if
Arkadin's ultimate secret, the past guilt he most wants to conceal, is safe from detection.
When it proves not to be, Arkadin realizes that
the man must be silenced for good.

For many of Welles' admirers Touch of Evil
(his last attempt to come to terms with the
Hollywood studio system) is his masterpiece.
Welles plays Hank Quinlan, a fat, decaying,
crack cop, whose sense of deistic superiority
leads him to frame people whom his 'infallible'
instinct tells him are guilty. Welles sets the
action in a border town of nightmare seediness, whose other inhabitants include
Marlene
Dietrich as a languidly philosophical madame,
apparently a one-time flame of Quintan's, and
Akim Tamiroff as the patriarch of a bizarre
gang of hoodlums.

For years Touch of Evil was regarded as yet
another example of Hollywood's legendary
humiliation of creative genius: Universal
studios' editors were alleged to have butchered
Welles' original version. More recently, however, this has been reconstituted, and it is
arguable that the Universal conception was
actually an improvement; by leaving out some
too-literal explanatory scenes, the cuts enhanced the sense of mystery and metaphysic which is the film's great attraction.

Orson Welles ~ Touch of Evil

Le Proces (1962, The Trial), a Franco-Italian-
German co-production, was shot in Paris and
Zagreb. Much admired on its first appearance,
it now seems one of Welles' least successful
works. His own evident philosophical distance
from Kafka results not so much in invigorating tensions as in excessive debate: for an Orson Welles picture it is, unusually, often tediously
talkative. Visually the film is remarkable.
Much of it was shot in the abandoned buildings of the Gare d'Orsay in Paris: the old
railway station, often bathed in swirling mists, provides some stunning images.

Thanks to Spanish and Swiss finance,
Welles was next able to return to Shakespeare
with a film that may well remain, alongside Citizen Kane, his monument - Chimes at Midnight (1966). In a textual adaptation so brilliant that even the most demanding Shakespearean cannot fault it on grounds of scholarship, Welles assembled scenes from Richard II,
Henry IV Part I and II, Henry V and The Merry
Wives of Windsor, along with a commentary
taken from the Chronicles of the Elizabethan
historian Holinshed, to create a wholly new
work which might be alternatively titied The
Tragedy of Sir John Falstaff. Without any
violence to Shakespeare's own, essentially
comic, vision of Falstaff, Welles extracts a
character that is heroic in his humour, generosity and goodness, flawed perhaps, but finally tragic in his incomprehension of the
ingratitude of the great and powerful.

Over the years Welles acted indefatigably -
often appearing in two or three films per year.
Some of his roles - in Jane Eyre (1943), The
Third Man (1949), Compulsion (1959) and
Catch-22, for example - are memorable; all are
enjoyable: none is without a conscientious
intelligence. Often, however, Welles' willingness to accept parts in the most inconsiderable material - from TV commercials to Casino
Royale (1967) - looks positively cynical. His
majestic, unflawed performance as Falstaff,
however, demonstrated that, to whatever extent he might have prostituted his talent to the
service of much lesser creators, he had kept
intact and pure his gifts as an interpreter.'

Histoire Immortelle (1968, Immortal Story),
adapted from a tale by Isak Dineson (the
pseudonym of Karen Blixen), provided him
vith another of the monsters he loves: a man like
Kane and Arkadin, rich and powerful in
the worldly sense but troubled by a secret sense
of incompleteness. This old man, Mr Clay, is
the embodiment of the traditional sailors'
legend of the rich man of Macao who invites a
young mariner to sleep with his beautiful wife
(played by Jeanne Moreau), and fulfil the marital function of which he is himself incapable.
Brief, classical and near-perfect, this film was Welles' last completed formal story film.

His wanderings continued. He acted in
Bondarchuk's Waterloo (1970) and Chabrol's
La Decade Prodigieuse (1971, Ten Days' Wonder).
His rich, inimitable voice and superb diction
were constantly in demand for film commentaries; and it was thus that he "came to
work with Francois Reichenbach. Out of their
collaboration came the delicious, enigmatic
Verites et Mensonges (1973, F for Fake). Welles
was fascinated by some 16mm footage Reichenbach had shot for a TV series on fakers, with
the celebrated art forger Elmyr de Hory and
Clifford Irving, who, subsequent to the original
Reichenbach film, had become famous as the
faker of Howard Hughes' 'autobiography'. To
these, Welles added his own fakes (in which he
included his role in the radio production of
War of the Worlds which, over thirty years
earlier, had fooled thousands of Americans
into thinking that the USA was under attack
by Martians). Welles orchestrates this material
so as to entice the spectator into a fascinating
labyrinth.

Orson Welles

Old now but still exuding boyish mischief,
Welles relished his film persona of magician
and charlatan, amiably deceiving his willing
audience with wonderful sleight of hand. Yet
his place in movie history was nearer, in reality,
to one of his tragic characterizations. Potentially one of the most gifted figures of world
cinema, his output in the forty five years or so of his career had been miserably small, a constant story of frustrated or abortive projects. This may be detected in
the tale he told himself in Filming Othello
(1978) - his contribution to which undoub-
tedly went further than mere commentary and
interview. He confessed to an interviewer in 1965:

'I do not work enough. I am frustrated. Do you
understand?'

Orson Welles died of a heart attack on the 10th October 1985 in Hollywood.